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Valve Reveals Steam's 2016 Top Earners -- Including 'No Man's Sky' (pcgamer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes PC Gamer:
In a surprise announcement today to kick off 2017, Valve has revealed the 100 best-selling Steam games of 2016... Although the "Top Sellers" section of Steam gives a constant sense of what's selling now, Valve hasn't previously compiled an annual list of which Steam games earned the most money... Rather than ranked in order from 1-100, the list is separated into tiers, from Platinum to Bronze, based on revenue (as opposed to copies sold)... Doom didn't crack the top 12, but it may have gotten close: it's ranked somewhere between 13th and 24th
That second-place Gold tier included more modern throwbacks to classic games, including Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, and Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20-Year Celebration. Meanwhile, No Man's Sky, which got off to a rocky start this summer before its massive November update, still turned up in the top "Platinum" tier for revenue earned in 2016. (And it's now discounted 40%.)
In fact, "As an extension of the Winter Sale, all but six of these games are on sale," reports PC Gamer. The other top-earning Steam games were Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Grand Theft Auto V, Civilization VI, and DOTA 2 (which is free to play), as well as Rocket League, XCOM 2, Dark Souls III, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Fallout 4, Total War: Warhammer, and Tom Clancy's The Division.
That second-place Gold tier included more modern throwbacks to classic games, including Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, and Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20-Year Celebration. Meanwhile, No Man's Sky, which got off to a rocky start this summer before its massive November update, still turned up in the top "Platinum" tier for revenue earned in 2016. (And it's now discounted 40%.)
In fact, "As an extension of the Winter Sale, all but six of these games are on sale," reports PC Gamer. The other top-earning Steam games were Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Grand Theft Auto V, Civilization VI, and DOTA 2 (which is free to play), as well as Rocket League, XCOM 2, Dark Souls III, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Fallout 4, Total War: Warhammer, and Tom Clancy's The Division.
Apparently not.
Interestingly, about half of the game in that top 100 list are available for Linux. That is about the same number available for Mac. Obviously they are all available for windows.
I have been casually playing on Debian using steam. And I do find enough game to keep me entertained. I am not sure whether Unity, steam OS, or the need to port games to mobile systems contributed to the increase in gaming support for Linux. But Linux definitely seems to have reasonable gaming options.
Opinions ?
When someone asks you to polish a turd, what they are really telling you to do is cover it in gold spray paint and glitter.
Knowing this is important, some people have actually tried to fix impossible messes.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Looking at the list, half of the Platinum earners are RPGs and strategy games, with 3 shooters. Of the Gold earners, 9/12 are shooters. Of the Silver earners, 6/16 are strategy/simulation games. Throughout, many of the highest earners are zombie-themed, open-world, or survival sandbox games. There are 1, 2, 2, and 3 free-to-play games in the Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze categories respectively. Yes, the highest-earning f2p game is Dota2.
This suggests that niche titles (RPGs, simulation/strategy titles) are some of the best-sellers on PC, as these genres have traditionally been under-served on consoles (think Diablo 1 on PSX compared to Baldur's Gate, rather than a consolified RPG like Witcher 3).
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
If Valve has profit from it they have money to refund. The game's a ripoff and they clearly know it.
to earn so much money on a game with a community such as CS:GO, and letting the good, friendly players put up with it. There are so many things they could do to clean the community up a bit, but of course it's better to keep the bad eggs since they are also spending money. Fucking criminal.
when the Windows Store went *pop*. If that new games for windows thing they pushed with Killer Instinct & Forza had taken off maybe Valve would get the jeebees scared enough to go back to it, but right now it's looking kinda tepid.
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I find it particularly confusing how a game rated "Mostly Negative" still had the highest sales revenue. At first I thought it was based on sales and didn't include refunds.. but apparently it's based on revenue, which should include refunds.
At some point I read Steam stopped giving refunds on it, so perhaps there were a large populous that maybe didn't read the reviews before purchasing it.. or actually enjoyed the limited gameplay.
I didn't refund on the off chance future patches add content. Perhaps I am a closet optimist.
How can the free to play games end up in the top 100 as measured by gross revenue. There must be a whole lot of optional purchases going on.
A lot of the time, some fraction of your customer base, even though disappointed, for whatever reason never claims his refund. This applies to other products than games as well. There are different reasons, for example people might not consider it worth the bother or time, people might not know they can claim a refund, or they've got other things going on in their lives that are more important so they forget about it. So there is always good money to be made in promising people things that you cannot possibly deliver on.
And rather handsomely as No Man's Sky shows. Apparently, the only thing they needed to do is make the first 3-4 hours interesting and give people some false hope. Personally, I canceled my pre-order after reading the early reviews.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. If customers do not punish game-makers for bad quality and broken promises, what do people expect to happen next time?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I find it particularly confusing how a game rated "Mostly Negative" still had the highest sales revenue.
Almost all of it was pre-launch purchases. Game was hyped into the 8th dimension. it was on the "top sellers" list months before launch.
However, many players spent more than 2 hours playing the game, waiting to find all those neat things they were promised, before they realized the game was not what they had been told it would be. And after 2 hours of game-time you can't refund the game anymore.
Others are still clinging on hoping the devs will fix the mess and release the game they showed the world during E3 and whatnot.
30% my collection has Linux ports and that excludes most of the AAA titles, you can check on steamdb.info there is a calculator which shows your account value and other things.
The Linux filter is dead last in the list and you have to scroll to get to it - rather telling unfortunately.
It's definitely getting better but not enough to ditch Windows 7. I guess it depends on whether what you want to play/buy is listed there.
There are also some non-Steam things that work with Wine like I play Hearthstone which runs well under battle.net (Blizzard) on my Mint Thinkpad without issues.
Pre-orders. The game was waaaaay popular for the first day with huge download and player volumes.
No Man's Sky is currently hovering between the 1000-2000 active player mark. Before the patch to fix many of the issues it was around 300-500 players. Opening weekend was looking more like 200000. People played it, thought it was shit and then either didn't get a refund or weren't granted a refund.
for false advertising in the UK and cleared according to a Forbes article I won't like because even with my extensive ad blocking it was barely legible.
Here's a /. story about a lot of begrudgingly given refunds
I read about it before it was released and it looked like another kickstarter-style scam to me and I knew the tears would be copious especially where they billed it as multiplayer but then said your chances of actually encountering someone else would be astronomically low.
There is a unfulfilled change.org petition and lots of other shit out there about it. I still have 0 interest personally.
Of the 12 games in their platinum category, half (CS:GO, DOTA 2, Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Grand Theft Auto V, and Rocket League) came out before 2016 (though Fallout 4 had a Nov 2015 release so kinda falls into both years).
Same things with the 12 games in the gold category. Only 4 were released in 2016, 2 in late 2015. And only 5 of the 16 games in the silver category were released in 2016 or late 2015.
Message to game companies: Good older games with long-term playability make as much money as new games with big advertising budgets which are just a flash in the pan. So don't rush it - take the time to playtest it and do it right.
What, is the voice actor for Gordon Freeman busy or something?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
But its a fantastic study of how long your perseverance can push past your dwindling curiosity.
I particularly like the non-repetitive realism:
You are on a very cold planet and will shortly die, unless you get under some overhanging earth and into the shade, where the planet is *less* cold.
You are on a very radioactive planet and will shortly die, unless you get under ground, where the planet is *less* radioactive.
I haven't got to my 3rd planet yet, but I expect it will be a very hot planet, where you will shortly die, unless you get underground, where the planet is *less* hot.
And why are there "sentinels" flying around getting pissed at you for mining? Presumably the player is trespassing on pre-claimed land and stealing the mineral resources of another race. So they are promoting theft as adventure?
I should stop over-analyzing this.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
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Go back to reddit
And why are there "sentinels" flying around getting pissed at you for mining? Presumably the player is trespassing on pre-claimed land and stealing the mineral resources of another race. So they are promoting theft as adventure?
No, the sentinels are pissed at you for mining because they're a kind of anti-technology enforcement agency. They're there to make sure the races in the galaxy (and you) don't get too competent/capable/technologically advanced. A sort of evolutionary impediment.
So they're promoting technological luddism as adventure.
Yes, this is actually the backstory for them in game.
I find it particularly confusing how a game rated "Mostly Negative" still had the highest sales revenue.
Maybe it is because a significant portion of owners have not played the game yet. There are a lot of gamers who buy more games than they can play (especially indie titles). If you already have a large backlog of games and then you hear reports that the game hasn't delivered on all the features they claimed it would have, then it isn't a problem to put it on your backlog and wait for future patches to improve the gameplay wasting time on a half-finished game.
Now if you don't mind, I must go and try this Half Life 2 that they came out with. I hear that it's going to be the next big thing!
Of the games listed, I don't own any of the Platinum, Gold, or Silver. Of the Bronze group, I own very few games.of the games (5 of them, although one is on Origin not Steam).--and I own 1097 games. Most of this is because almost all games I buy I obtain in bundles or through trades. The bigger reason is that very few of the listed games are ones I'm interested in. In honesty, probably three-quarters of those 1097 games are ones I'm not really interested in but before I started trying to gift/trade away games.
Even so, I'm only interested in a meaningful way in some of the Bronze games and none of the Platinum/Gold/Silver games. Some of this, no doubt, is due to their price* or because I have a marginally comparable game in my own library of games. The biggest reason though is simply way too many are focused on either open world, crafting, or online play. The first too get old very quickly and online play has long ago lost its major draw for me**. I would say I am pleasantly surprised with the large number of metroidvanias, shooters, and generally good platforms (2d or 3d). Still, it's sort of depressing to see the list and know that they're the sort of games most enjoyed by people.
* It's not that I don't have the money. It's that it's hard to justify buying a $30 game (which is at a ~50% discount) when even a bundle like Yogscast which included a lot of games there were worthless to me gave me a better value ratio (even without trades). At this point, buying a $30 game makes me think I either (1) have to play a lot of it to try to justify the cost to myself or (2) try to justify the cost towards others (even though no one asks) because it seems ludicrous given you can get a good bundle of games for $3 worth a lot more than a $30 game. Of course, there's also a lot of crap bundles. But I'd even still contend you'd be better off buying 10 bundles straight from Indiegala or Bundlestars at $3 (or however many to add up to $30 for bundles that don't go over $4) than that one $30 game. Which makes me wonder if that's what's messing up the stats.
** FPSs were fun but you need really low latency. And now that we've got tons of people who make those games nearly a life of theirs, it's better to just avoid them if you want to have any serious fun--or you want to become a master of the game. MMOs? Not worth the money. Most other 4x/strategy/whatever? I'd probably rather play against a computer, honestly, or in a single player campaign. In the end, though, it'd still probably not be worth it.to invest the time. That last part is probably the biggest refrain that refrains me from choosing much other than games I can just quickly play and resume later. Or for which playthroughs are short enough I can do a run and improve and play again.
The writer of Half-Life retired over 2 years ago.
It's because Steam's refund policy is poorly suited for sandbox-type games and particularly NMS. Steam's policy is refunds are available if you have fewer than 2 hours of gameplay. More than that you can sometimes get them to refund it, but the longer you've played the less likely they are to refund it. It's easy to tell a game like an FPS stinks in an hour, but by design in a survival/sandbox game it takes a good bit of time to get your feet under you and get to exploring the wider world outside your starting area.
Most NMS players will burn through Steam's refund period just getting their ship repaired and getting off the starter planet. It takes you about an hour of poking around to explore a solar system, so by the time you were able to see there was no content beyond gathering resources just so you can keep repeating the same five or six interactions at different locations you were about 10-20 hours in and Steam wouldn't refund it.
thats because that list is probably invented, its a list on their own store site, with a nice button to BUY the game
i mean, its pretty obvious what it is
also, people that got ripped off deserve it. If you are a gamer you should have an IDEA of whats possible and whats bullshit. You will not find a car guy that buys a car on the promise it can go 500 km/h and travel thru time to marty mcfly 60s imaginary town.
I have to say it's great seeing a F2P game done right, like Path of Exile, hit the top 100 revenue earner on Steam. Great game by the way for you Diablo lovers.
Never mind that, I suck goat cock.
You're looking at the wrong number. You should be looking at the vote totals. Since you have to pay in order to leave a rating this makes perfect sense.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Others are still clinging on hoping the devs will fix the mess and release the game they showed the world during E3 and whatnot.
I think the only reason they are patching game is because of a pending class action lawsuit I hear about. Strong bullshit argument helps. As far as game goes, it is not actualy too bad. Pirated 1.3 version. It was ok. Good times while high. But it gets boring fast and is nothing like what is advertised.
They had the balls to keep the original trailer even after shit storm. What a bunch of assholes. But in the end I don't think game can be fixed. Another excellent example is X:Rebirth. I saw that one coming.
is Half Life 3 the new Duke Nukem Forever?
Valve invented the roller-coaster scripted FPS, so they had a huge first mover advantage. Today? There's been a Call of Duty every year, whatever other games I don't care about to be aware of them or remember them, and similar follow-the-yellow-line third person games like Uncharted. Importantly, they're big budget Hollywood-like shit, that most people can't play on their PC.
Valve does games that play on laptops and consumer PCs. If they make a high budget Half-Life 3, it will be an incentive for their customers to go buy an Xbox or PS4 to play it, or to buy it on one of these. This doesn't draw customer to the Steam store. If they make it high budget, Steam only, it might struggle to have enough sales to recoup the costs, or people will be dissatisfied seeing it run at 15fps on their laptop?
If they make it friendly to lowly hardware, it can be quite a success. But it will be ridiculed by all the elitist snobs with their i5s and i7s and big vid cards. Even though games haven't changed since 2004 except for bumping up the specs and showing more triangles and pixels (my opinion)
Fuck it, the last then-recent game I remember running on my PC was Left 4 Dead. I since gave up on almost all games. I refuse to spend $1000 on upgrades, or just to buy the right $150 card to play games on linux, poorly. Just as with all those people refusing to buy a $400-$500 tablet.
Or you could just analyse competently. The sun is hot and a radiation source, going underground will block it. Underground is often warmer than the cold air, though a little bit of rock over your head wont really make the slightest difference, a cave might.
Steam accepted refunds for weeks after purchase for this particular game, simply because the backlash was so huge. The lack of the expected revenue loss was NOT because people couldn't refund it.
The truth of the matter is, while it didn't deserve the absurd fan generated hype by any means, it wasn't that bad. Not great, not bad, just meh. A small, though larger than normal, portion of the gaming population were extremely upset over this, but for most people it's not that different than any other game, and isn't enough to get a refund over..
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Isn't this based on reviews and votes, not purchases? Look on PSN and the game has over 130,000 thumbs up, compare that to Dark Souls 3 which has about 70,000
I wasn't talking about the reason, just the repetition.
Next I landed on a "toxic" planet. I would die if I stayed on the surface. Underground it was less "toxic". You don't think the pattern is a little over used?
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.